For the last twenty years, a tremendous amount of investments have been lost due to unsuccessful projects in different sectors of activity that are highly dependent on information systems. For the majority of these projects the main reason is the absence of predictive capability that might help early enough to prevent later on a performance crisis.
Much of the software development is performed on an ad hoc basis or at least in a customizing approach. Typically there are no feedback loops close to the design stage to prevent ultimate substandard results in the final product, e.g. an information system.